An evaluation of methodologies for melodic similarity in audio recordings of Indian art music

Gulati, Sankalp; Serrà Julià, Joan; Serra, Xavier

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2015.7178055

An evaluation of methodologies for melodic similarity in audio recordings of Indian art music

Citation

Gulati S, Serrà J, Serra X. An evaluation of methodologies for melodic similarity in audio recordings of Indian art music. In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing: proceedings; 2015 Apr 19-24; Brisbane, Australia. p. 678-82. DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2015.7178055

Abstract

We perform a comparative evaluation of methodologies for computing similarity between short-time melodic fragments of audio recordings of Indian art music. We experiment with 560 different combinations of procedures and parameter values. These include the choices made for the sampling rate of the melody representation, pitch quantization levels, normalization techniques and distance measures. The dataset used for evaluation consists of 157 and 340 annotated melodic fragments of Carnatic and Hindustani music recordings, respectively. Our results indicate that melodic fragment similarity is particularly sensitive to distance measures and normalization techniques. Sampling rates do not have a significant impact for Hindustani music, but can significantly degrade the performance for Carnatic music. Overall, the performed evaluation provides a better understanding of the processing steps and parameter settings for melodic similarity in Indian art music. Importantly, it paves the way for developing unsupervised melodic pattern discovery approaches, whose evaluation is a challenging and, many times, ill-defined task.

Description

Comunicació presentada a l'ICASSP 2015, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, que es va celebrar els dies 19 al 24 d'abril de 2015 a Brisbane, Austràlia.